She’s Everywhere and I Don’t Mind

Three films, one spring. Her, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Under the Skin. Scarlett Johansson wasn’t just having a good year in early 2014—she was occupying some kind of cultural singularity, simultaneously a disembodied voice driving a man insane with longing, a spy saving the world from a helicarrier, and a predatory alien stalking men through the Scottish Highlands. Different directors, different genres, same impossible presence. And on top of all that, the cover of the Wall Street Journal Magazine, shot by Alasdair McLellan.

She was 29 at the time. I’d first really noticed her in Lost in Translation—that unhurried film about displacement and half-spoken feelings, where she played someone adrift in Tokyo and somehow made that feel like the most specific thing in the world. I was adrift in my own way then too. The movie hit differently because of her.

In the WSJ interview she talked about the free will of modern technology, managing career and family simultaneously, and a desire—long-held and apparently genuine—to stop being just an object of longing. Which is a strange thing to want when you’ve built a career partly on exactly that currency. But she’s right that it never lasts on those terms anyway. The desire economy is fickle. What lasts is the work, and in 2014 she had more good work running simultaneously than most actors manage in a decade. Ach, Scarlett.